Word: agri
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Farmers' wives have also joined the action. Michigan-based American Agri-Women, representing some 12,000 farm women, dispenses information, delivers pep talks, and lobbies state legislatures and occasionally the U.S. Congress...
...elections were stopped for a ten-month period last year as agri-business lobbyists blocked funding for the new law in the state legislature, and the state agency assigned to enforcing the law has been slow to certify elections and decide unfair labor practice complaints such as growers firing union supporters. As of this month, UFW has won the first eight elections under a rejuvenated law. The Teamsters have stopped participating in elections...
With the millions of dollars in subsidies that agri-business has received, industry growers have never bothered to establish one clinic, serve, or educational program for any of the 250,000 farmworkers that harvest California's $1 billion worth of crops each year. But huge sums have been spent on lawyers and advertising to prevent union elections and to stall contract negotiations...
...migrant system has been perpetuated by mutually reinforcing factors: corporate agri-business interest in keeping an inflated migrant labor pool, in order to keep wages down and therefore labor costs relatively low (e.g., the total cost of field labor for lettuce comes to $.24 per head); oligopolistic practices of big business; government land granting history; and pricing and taxing policies. As important as any of these factors has been society's way of society instead of acknowledging migrants as members of the same society...
...this country, as the scent of new money and power spreads a lot of changes are taking place, and more are expected. The big-oil boys (petropower, says Butz) who have had their way m Washington for so long, now face a challenge from agri-power. No new farm bloc has formed on the Hill because the new food equation embraces everyone from Wall Street bankers to the hired hand. But if the various interests in food can find common ground, the pressure that such a lobby could bring would dwarf anything seen in the capital...